I'll be honest, before I really got into languages I really didn't know they had families. I mean, I knew that English was a bit Germanic, and a bit French and that Welsh was definitely Celtic and a bit like Irish, but beyond that? It's been a long journey. Now I know that we have proto languages, language families, branches of different trees and languages that borrow from others but retain a distinct root. We have languages that use alphabets, even when they weren't designed for that language (Persian) and it makes them harder than they could be. So we have a wonderful world of difference and similarity. Although I speak English I've recently found that Spanish and Catalan come to me better than German does. So although English structure is similar to German, it is the shared cognates of English and Spanish and Catalan that make those seem easier to me. Or maybe I'm just not studying German enough! Anyway, here's a nice picture showing Turkic languages through eurasia, which shows the infinitesimal difference in our world.

Picture: Wikipedia